New Postar will standardise out-of-home audience data: but all OTS are not created equal

Steve Cox, ex-marketing director at Titan Outdoor, explains how Postar will standardise out of home audience data.

I recently read something by David Brennan of Thinkbox criticising the estimation of coverage for mixed-media campaigns by combining results from various audience measurement vehicles. He rightly pointed out that not only are the research methodologies usually different, but also the “communication value” of an OTS will vary from medium to medium. It’s all very well looking at combined cover or OTS, but does anyone really imagine that the effect of seeing a commercial on TV equates to that of seeing an ad in a newspaper or on a billboard? And yet that’s precisely what this process assumes.

If simply getting the message in front of people was all that mattered then this wouldn’t really be an issue (except that some currencies can’t even really prove that this happens!). In fact it would be great for outdoor, because roadside posters are probably the most cost-effective way there is for getting a big branding message seen.

Plus, of course, the great thing about posters is that we really do know how likely it is that this “seeing” will occur. Postar is more rigorous than any other medium’s research currency in homing in on “netted down” OTS. There’s no “I spent some time on a road where there was a poster so I must have seen it”, or “I was out of my home for ten minutes yesterday so I must have seen all the posters within a one mile radius of my house”. Postar takes the whole mass of people who pass in front of a panel and then deducts all those who are unlikely or unable to have seen it.

The exciting news for 2010 is that Postar plans to take a further leap forward to truly deliver a Gold Standard in audience measurement. The coverage and frequency calculations will in future be driven by the UK’s largest ever ongoing GPS travel survey, and all the major out-of-home environments not currently covered will eventually be brought under the new Postar umbrella.

That’s particularly encouraging at a time when clients are rightly demanding more accountability from all of their media activity. However, Dave’s point set me thinking. Not only is it valid across different media, it surely also applies when considering different platforms within the same medium? Whilst it’s great that planners will in future be able to use Postar to derive combined cover and frequency for campaigns using posters on the side of the road, on phone boxes, and in rail stations, we need to be aware that this isn’t the whole story.

In the same way that an OTS on TV differs from one on radio, so it’s also incorrect to assume that an OTS on a billboard is of equal value to one in a shopping mall or an airport. This isn’t a criticism of Postar. It’s not the job of a media currency to put a value on OTS. The task for Postar, or BARB, or the NRS is simply to predict as accurately as possible how many OTS a media schedule will generate. Not the effect of the individual exposures, simply how many there will be.

All OTS are not created equal. Any one of a number of factors not measured by a survey such as Postar might make one contact worth more than another. The length of potential exposure would be a good example. In outdoor circles we generally refer to this as dwelltime. Most sane planners would recognise that the communications effect of standing opposite a 48 sheet on a station platform for 7 minutes is greater than driving past it at twenty mph. It’s not the job of Postar to prove or measure this, just to tell us whether it’s likely to happen. As media owners, if we wish to put a value on this extra dwell time then it’s incumbent on us to find a way to measure it. Plus of course it’s important that planners and buyers recognise that their future ability to measure OTS across each outdoor platform is not all that’s required in putting together an effective schedule. It should always be the start point, but needs augmenting with insight (ideally quantified by additional research) into how likely these OTS are to convert to genuine engagement in different environments.

Planners and buyers should take this in their stride, as they already adapt to the planning opportunities of other media. Post-campaign assessments of TV schedules will routinely analyse the number of “appointment to view” programmes purchased alongside the total ratings delivered. Press buyers will seek to secure right hand pages or a good presence in appropriate editorial content alongside their achievement of agreed coverage and frequency targets. The outdoor industry simply needs to do likewise and recognise that, whilst it may now have arguably the most robust measure of realistic OTS, it cannot rely on this alone to provide advertisers with all the data needed to make a fully informed choice of the most appropriate panels.